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“None!” He was back at her side. One of his hands was on her breast, making it difficult to speak. And his other hand . . . well, he did know her anatomy as well as he boasted. Later they lay together in a heap of tangled limbs. He traced a figure on her creamy flank. “Does your hip hurt when we make love?”

She shook her head.

“What makes it hurt? You were in pain this afternoon, weren’t you?”

“Only a trifle,” she said, surprised. She was certain that she had concealed it. “I was tired.”

“You should have told me. Madame Humphries is so overjoyed to be dressing you that she would have kept you standing all afternoon.”

Henrietta smiled. She still didn’t care two pins for clothing, but it was rather astounding to discover how differently she looked in clothing not designed and sewn by Mrs. Pinnock.

“I find it interesting that your lame hip looks precisely the same as the other,” Darby said. “I don’t understand why doc-Fool for Love 297

tors believe that you would be unable to bear a child, Henrietta. There’s no difference between this hip”—he caressed it again—“and that of other women.”

Henrietta frowned. She didn’t like to think about other women’s hips in relation to her husband. He knew, of course. “Not that I plan to compare your luscious hip to anyone else’s,” he said into her ear. “Why don’t we visit a London doctor, Henrietta? There’s a famous physician on St. James’s Street who is also an accoucheur. Ortolon, I believe his name is.”

“Whether you can see the problem or not, it exists. Truly, it was a miracle that I survived,” she said earnestly. “And my mother was not so lucky.”

“Were people cruel when you were growing up?”

“Not cruel,” she said slowly. “It was more that the reality of it was cruel. Because I grew up in a very small village, there was nothing unexpected about anyone’s future. Billy Lent was the bad boy in the grammar school, and everyone said he was bound for the Assizes. Sure enough, he was sent there before he reached eighteen. I was lame, and everyone said I would never marry.”

She looked at him with a glimmering smile. “I would have seen it as a crueler fate if I had imagined someone like you walking down the High Street of Limpley Stoke.” Warm brown hair tumbled past his perfectly shaped ear. The drape of linen sheet over his hip turned him into a Roman senator.

“Did you never dream of marriage, then? You must have!”

“Of course I did. But I thought I would find an older man, someday, perhaps a widower with children. Someone who would wish for a companion, not—”

He raised his mouth from her breast. “Not a bedmate.”

“I didn’t quite understand that,” Henrietta said.

“That’s right. You hadn’t put together marital pleasure and babies, did you?”

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She shook her head, and then added, teasingly, “And I still can’t countenance why it’s so important to gentlemen!”

“Probably wouldn’t have been important to the kind of doddering old stick you thought of marrying.”

“I didn’t imagine doddering. But what other choice did I have?”

“I was just lucky enough to be the first gentleman to walk into that village, Henrietta. There’s not a man among my friends who wouldn’t have leaped at you, hip or no hip.”

“Rees wouldn’t have,” she pointed out.

“Ah, but he would. As a matter of fact, he’s having a difficult time accepting the fact that he finds you amusing, and intelligent, and beautiful,” Darby said, his lips leaving scorching little trails on her skin. “Thrown his world into a spin, you have.”

“He isn’t!” Henrietta gasped.

“Poor sod. He’s too late. You’re mine.” He pulled her closer, under his body.

She clutched his forearms. “But what about children?

Wouldn’t all those London gentlemen have wanted children?”